My Last review of 2025

In this post, I am reviewing Rutger Christiaan Bregman’s recent book Humankind: A Hopeful History (Bloomsbury, London, 2020)

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and author whose name I had never heard before I picked up this well-researched positive perspective on human history.  He has been described by The Guardian as the "Dutch wunderkind of new ideas" and by TED Talks as "one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers.” Indeed, he is very young in my book, being a mere 37 years of age as this year draws to a close.  As an international bestseller, the cover of my paperback edition and several pages in the front matter are covered with encomiums to the author’s brilliance and to the wisdom contained within.  Stephen Fry’s appraisal of this book, like the other thirty pithy and eulogising promotional quotations, sings the praises of the positivity of this history as a possible and probable renewal of our faith in “the innate goodness and natural decency of human beings.”  There is no doubt at all that this book was written some time before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the war in Gaza, the ravages of Covid-19, and the present vulnerable state of the geopolitical world.

This self-declared ‘hopeful history’ argues that the underlying nature of human beings is not savage but essentially nice.  This thesis is a venerable one in a tradition that goes back at least as far as the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on whom the author regularly relies for his view that humans are naturally nice, and it is the institutions of civilisation that have inevitably corrupted us. We were originally peacenik hunter-gatherers and noble savages before this systematised corruption kicked in. Bregman contrasts this nobility and gentility of origin with what he calls, following the biologist Frans de Waal, “veneer theory”: the view (attributed to Hobbes, among others) that civilisation is a thin skin of decency barely concealing the savage ape underneath. The “veneer” theory, Bregman insists, is totally wrong, and he sets about proving to the reader that the human being is at base essentially kind-hearted and is no savage ape.  To this end, he carefully amasses many heart-warming stories of humankind’s essential decency.  In so doing, he is following in the footsteps of the journalist, Malcolm Gladwell, who, through his anecdote-driven and storytelling style, often simplifies complex topics to make them accessible and inspiring for his readership.

However, what I do not like about this book is the author’s dichotomisation of good and evil.  As an erstwhile psychotherapist, I recoil from such polarisation.  Philosophically, I did not like his resurrection of that tired old question, “Is the human being innately good or innately evil?” If one takes this dichotomising or polarising of these questions literally, one can stack up many instances or examples from history of human beings carrying out evil deeds and many instances or examples from that same history of their doing exceptionally good deeds.  However, there are no real weighing scales on which I can place the weighty load of both the good and the evil to see which one outstrips the other.  Unfortunately, Bregman loads the scales with examples of where, obviously, according to him, the weight of the good outstrips by far the weight of the evil in the world.  The author would need to read the negative output of the late intellectual Christopher Hitchens to give some balance to his argument.  Now, I hasten to add that I am not a subscriber to the latter’s viewpoint.  What I am getting at here is that Good and Evil as a spectrum of behaviour has to be accepted as a more objective perspective on good and evil as they present themselves in history. To this extent, I believe that John Locke was indeed somewhat right when he maintained that the human brain/mind is a “tabula rasa” or “blank slate” on which society acts.  Undoubtedly, we have to add the impact of genetics and epigenetics too.  (Epigenetics studies how behaviours and environment can cause changes that affect the way our genes work, without altering the DNA sequence itself.)  We are formed by the complex interaction of Nature and Nurture. Nature refers to our genetic inheritance and biological predispositions (genes, DNA, etc.), while Nurture encompasses all external influences, experiences, and environmental factors from conception onward (upbringing, culture, learning and so on).

Again, I guess I am too much an existentialist at heart, filled with too much angst or anxiety, to swallow wholesale Bregman’s sheer positivity.  Indeed, I have often stated in these pages that I suffer from clinical depression, which has thankfully been successfully treated for the last thirty or so years.  I state this here by way of acknowledging my own biases due to the state of my own mental equipment.  After all, we see the world not as it is, but as we are.  We can readily agree with much of Bregman’s obvious declarations like “dictators and despots, governors and generals all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that only exist in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest just like them” (p. 7) And we can all too readily apply this assessment to our present geopolitical situation in the world.  Furthermore, we can readily accept the contention that “If you believe something enough, it can become real…. We are what we believe.  We find what we are looking for.  And what we predict comes to pass.”  As a teacher who spent some forty years in a secondary classroom, if one believes that a class has little ability, this belief will become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” which acts to the detriment of both teacher and pupil.

Bergman rightly underlines the fact that cynicism often rules our modern approach to life; that we naturally take a negative view of humanity; that laws, many companies and institutions assume that people cannot be trusted and that the news we are fed daily is “a mental health hazard.” (p.13) This is described by sociologist Georg Gerbner (1919 -- 2005) as “the mean world syndrome.” (quoted p. 13)

However, it is Bregman’s underlying thesis that is at fault; that it is too simplistic and does not take into account the sheer complexity of the human condition.  Maybe because I am a melancholic existentialist and hold literary geniuses in too high a regard, that I am not convinced by Bregman’s demolition of William Golding’s thesis in Lord of the Flies and the author’s lauding of the native goodness of some Tongan children, shipwrecked on a Pacific island for over a year, as the more human response.  They apparently cooperated generously rather than re-enacting the basic warlike evil of Golding’s modern classic. Bregman’s argument (again following Rousseau) that the great tragedy of human history was the invention of agriculture and cities around 10,000 years ago has long been debunked.  Perhaps it is my melancholia that prevents me from swallowing whole Bregman’s Edenic positivity of the Tongan children.

All nasty stories and indeed studies about the evil that humans are capable of, Bregman attempts to show as mere “myths.”  He writes chapters respectively in an attempt to disprove the outcomes of Philip Zimbardo’s notorious Stanford prison experiment; the civil war, cannibalism and population collapse on Easter Island and finally Stanley Milgram’s “obedience” experiments, in which subjects were instructed by experimenters to give (fake) electric shocks to people in another room, and continued to do so even when the “victims” seemed to be in terrible pain. 

Also, I was somewhat disappointed in the author’s belief in a type of Utopian politics where democracy would appear far more attractive and realistic a route to follow for humankind newly come of age, determined to make a hopeful future. This ideal politically savvy world would involve, for example, widespread hyper-local participatory democracy, in which many more people go to endless town-hall meetings.

In summary, my criticism of this book is that its thesis is too simplistic.  That human beings are essentially good or essentially bad is a myth or a fairytale.  Human beings are far more complex and are often an amazing mixture of contradictions and paradoxes as our greatest creative artists have depicted them.  Their actions and inactions, their behaviours and misbehaviours, their good deeds and their bad deeds belong on a spectrum of good and evil, as do they.  The human condition or predicament is as mysterious as it is complex.  I remember learning an authentic piece of wisdom from an old teacher at school, which rings ever so true insofar as it captures the human condition or indeed its predicament, and it is a good quotation to finish this review: “There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behoves any of us to find fault with the rest of us."  Even bearing in mind my criticism, this book is still well worth reading as it is well-written and well-argued and provides some good material for philosophical, theological and ethical debate.